Christian kings and Jewish conversion in the medieval Crown of Aragon

Abstract

As Christian monarchs in the age of crusade and reconquista, the kings of the medieval Crown of Aragon had no choice but to show public support for Jewish conversion to Christianity, issuing legislation meant to encourage conversion and granting favors to individual converts. However, this public position disguised a deep ambivalence toward the conversion of Jews, whom kings considered personal property. This article explores the causes and expressions of this ambivalence during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It argues that when kings acted at cross-purposes to conversionary efforts, it was not only because these efforts threatened to thin the ranks of their Jewish subjects, who provided important funding for the royal treasury, but also because kings benefited financially from practices that discouraged Jewish conversion, such as the confiscation of converts' property and the sale to Jews of exemptions from compulsory conversionary sermons. These observations underscore the complexity of Christian attitudes toward Jewish conversion during the century and a half that preceded the pan-Iberian massacres and forced conversions of 1391.